Your Ancestors Are Probably Way More Interesting Than Mine
Tuesday, August 5th, 2008I don’t have many interesting stories about my parents or my ancestors. But you probably do. More than just a few of you have one or more immigrant grandparents, or one or more immigrant parents; you might even be an immigrant yourself.[1] You may have heard stories all your life about what it was like back in the Olde Countrye before they came here, or what it was like here after they arrived. You may have heard stories of successes and failures back home, and sorrows and joys, of terrible things like riots or pogroms or wars, or of great things like boat-lifts and war-brides (or war-bridegrooms). Once they got here, on whatever coast, did they know the language? Was there confusion about everyday customs and manners? Did they happily adjust or did they murmur about how ‘that’s not that way we did things, but alright, let’s try it and see…’
Since the World Wide Web will probably only fail if Humanity does, you should take a video camera, or a digital audio recorder, or even a good old fashioned tape recorder and ask your family members about their lives, then put it all online. Don’t let them forget anything, or, being gentle, don’t let them gloss over anything either. Their stories are not only their stories, and not stories just for you, but they’re all our stories as well, even if we don’t share common ancestors for ten thousand years. Their meme’s the thing in which we’ll catch the conscious of your kin. Yeah, it’s a stretched metaphor but gimme a break; it works and it’s context appropriate.
Even if a line of your relatives weren’t immigrants. What if they were here for two hundred years. Or ten thousand. There could still be a kick-ass story there. Get it in binary and post it.
Get recording. Aunts and uncles too, by the way, and cousins back home, and even neighbours from the same village or the same block who ended up here, wherever here is. Oshawa is the same as Suzuka. Prague is the same as Vancouver. Don’t let anything get forgotten, always remembering that even though it’s all subjective, it’s still worth more to humanity than leaves of gold on a tombstone.
So here’s the highlights of my family history that I know of, a bit from each side.
There was a family legend that my mother’s father had come to Canada shortly after the Partition of Ireland to escape a murder charge. I don’t remember who I heard this from, but it was probably one of my two young adult male Peterborough cousins, the father a Scottish immigrant Plenderleith masquerading as Dunn (his mother’s maiden name because it was easier to spell when he came here), when I was a young teenager. I found out several years ago, from an online genealogical website that my grandfather’s line of my family had been in Canada for a couple of generations before the Partition and were just farmers and ne’er-do-wells up around Huntsville. Can’t find that reference now but I remember reading it quite clearly. I believe the website I can’t substantiate before the family legend.
My mother once told us of an event in her one room school house in or near a village near Huntsville called Ravenscliffe. It was Valentine’s Day, probably around 1940 or so; Ruthie Sinclair’s mother had made her a red and white crepe-paper dress for the school party. Yes, people used to do this, at least well into the Sixties. Lillian (my mother), a boy named something like Podie Robertson (or Robinson) and some other students took Ruthie into the bathroom and splashed water all over her to make the red crepe paper colour run into the white. I don’t know what the consequences were, but I’m sure you can imagine. Lines, cleaning the brushes, emptying the woodstove, or even worse.
Now, my father, Norm (yeah, I know, I still laugh) was the youngest of his Raft of the Medusa of siblings. He was born and raised most of his childhood in a company house on the property of a gravel quarry right near the Trent Canal. The quarry has long since flooded and is now (and only fairly recently been) called Lake Kirkfield. At least in the early Seventies, the flooded quarry was mysterious, and coolly primal, for me and my local relatives when we were kids.
The big blue body is that flooded quarry. The long, curved, obviously artificial blue line in the bottom left of this image is the Trent Canal. I’ve posted a different version of this image once before.
He was born in 1930 (obit 1993), and when he was young, the only way to get into the village of Kirkfield was by a horse-and-cart in the summer and a horse-and-sleigh in the winter. Whenever my grandfather didn’t come home from the hotel in town (where he’d been drinking all afternoon; this was during the Depression) at a reasonable hour (no streetlights, no motorcars, no GPS, and what they used to call miles of desolation), my grandmother (the old harridan, the old termagant, the old virago; I shouldn’t have to point this out but, while she wasn’t actually a gangster, she, a maiden Stewart or Wilson, I don’t remember, was by marriage,a, but not the Ma Barker) would send Norm in the cart, or worse, the sleigh. He was the baby of the family, by many years, and he hated having to do it. But he told me this story decades later like it was a fond memory. I’m really glad he never had any access to Usenet, or, God help us all, what Usenet would become; shared porn and mutual misery, angst,and blame the parents.
=;]